H.264/MVC which is an extended version of the H.264/AVC standard and relates to a multiview video coding scheme is employed in Blu-ray 3D. Whereas realizing a large compression ratio by performing inter-view prediction in addition to H.264/AVC inter prediction in motion compensation, in H.264/MVC, the amount of processing is large and increases in proportion to the number of view points, particularly when reproducing a high-resolution multiview picture as in the case of Blu-ray 3D.
On the other hand, theoretically, inter-view prediction provides a high correlation because pictures of the same time point and different view points are referred to. Pictures of adjoining viewpoints would be similar to each other in a large number of portions of a region concerned. Although it is desired to provide more efficient processing which employs inter-view prediction having such features in addition to a conventional deblocking technique, no means for realizing that desire is known.